REWINDING WITH SOME THOUGHTS ON OLD CASSETTES

Sometime around 1998 I decided that the enormous box of cassette tapes that I had been carting around for roughly two decades had little future value. I had recently been out to the old Audio Replay in Harvard Square and bought a used Marantz receiver, a multidisc CD player, and hooked up a set of studio monitor speakers that a friend gave me. I still didn’t have a whole lot of CDs at the time, but compact discs clearly appeared to be the definitive wave of the future.

One night I decided to leave my box of cassettes out on the sidewalk with the trash while living in the North End of Boston. The tapes disappeared quickly. Many of my cassettes had been purchased at record stores while some of the older ones came through the mail from the Columbia Record and Tape Club. My box of cassettes featured artists like Bad Company, Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles, Bob Seger, Fleetwood Mac, Boz Scaggs, Steve Miller, Jackson Browne, The Commodores, The J. Geils Band, Jimmy Buffett, Billy Joel, The Cars, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Police, Styx, U2, Elvis Costello, Rush, and Journey. The collection also had some more ambitious musical selections like jazz tapes by Ornette Coleman and Thelonious Monk, solo work by Police guitarist Andy Summers recorded with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, and even independent local bands like The Stompers and the virtually unknown Faith Healers from the city of Brockton. But my loss was clearly everyone else’s gain. The entire box of cassettes was gone by the next morning.

For good measure, I held onto a few tapes, cassettes that I still have with me currently stacked below my vintage stereo system. It is an interesting collection of tapes, not so much because of the musical content but the potential reasoning that might have gone into why I chose to save the cassettes that I did.

I kept Glenn Frey’s first solo album from 1982, No Fun Aloud, a record he put out following the collapse of the Eagles. No Fun Aloud is actually a great album harkening back to some of Frey’s soulful Detroit influences with songs like “The One You Love” and “I Found Somebody”, but also has some great rockers like “Partytown” and “I’ve Been Born Again” as well as the Eagles-like song “She Can’t Let Go”. Saving this Glenn Frey tape was probably a good call as it is now almost impossible to find in any format that isn’t digital. I also held onto my Willie and the Poor Boys cassette, a throwback band put together during the mid-1980s consisting of Billy Wyman, Ronnie Wood, and Charlie Watts from the Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, Dire Straits drummer Terry Williams, and lead singer Paul Rogers from Bad Company. Originally formed to assist former Faces guitarist Ronnie Lane in his battle with Multiple Sclerosis, the group released an album of rock and roll classics including “Sugar Bee”, “Chicken Shack Boogie”, and Otis Redding’s “These Arms of Mine” to raise both funds and awareness. I kept Elvis Costello’s Get Happy, although it is not technically one of my favorite Costello records. In the case of this cassette, I wish I had saved his Trust album instead. According to critics, however, Get Happy is widely regarded as one of Elvis Costello’s best albums. I still have Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy cassette from 1978 with the songs “Send Lawyers Guns and Money”, “Tenderness on the Block”, and “Werewolves of London”. Not only am I happy that I held onto this tape with Warren Zevon continuing to gain notoriety as a songwriter in the years since his passing, but I’m also relatively sure that the cassette originally belonged to old friend, Maura Mulcahy, who could very well ask for it back someday. I have an early Brian Setzer solo album from 1988, Live Nude Guitars, the second record he did after the breakup of The Stray Cats featuring Setzer’s Eddie Cochran-inspired guitar playing on songs like “Rebelene” and a cover of the Cochran song, “Nervous Breakdown”. I held onto Rock and Roll Volumes I and II by the Beatles which feature early covers like “Kansas City” and “Roll Over Beethoven” on Volume I and “Drive My Car”, “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, and “Hey Bulldog” on the second tape. I kept my rare promotional copy of Billy Bragg’s Talking with the Taxman about Poetry featuring the song “Greetings to the New Brunette”, a tape that I purchased at Looney Tunes on Boylston Street in Boston for $4 according to the price sticker that is still on the case. I kept Boston band Scruffy the Cat’s Tiny Days cassette with Charlie Chesterman fronting the band for their local hit, “My Baby She’s Alright”. There is a bootleg cassette that I bought from a sidewalk vendor at the corner of Mass. Ave and Newbury Street in Boston, The Police playing the 1983 U.S. Festival in California. In the spirit of the times I also saved a few mixtapes including one I put together in 1987 that includes a set of unreleased demos from Boston musician Digney Fignus, songs that I was given access to while working as one of his roadies during the mid-1980s. I also saved a mixtape that I recorded at a friend’s beach house in Hull, Massachusetts, which features the music of several Boston bands like Barrence Whitfield and the Savages, O Positive, and Farrenheit, but also includes classic old recordings taken from original 45s by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. I saved a cassette with a recording from legendary Boston radio station WBCN featuring Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook of the band Squeeze interviewed by DJ Ken Shelton during which the pair performed live in the studio to promote their show at the Paradise Rock Club during the summer of 1991. I held onto a similar recording from May 15, 1989, featuring an acoustic appearance by the band XTC on WBCN promoting their album, Oranges and Lemons.

It is certainly an interesting array of choices that I made in putting aside the cassettes that I did and I’m happy to discover all these years later that most of my selections have held up either becoming rare finds or retaining significant cultural value in some way. I can’t say that I necessarily regret my decision to part with the rest of my cassettes, although I am at a clear disadvantage whenever I do get the urge to listen to “She Blinded Me With Science”.

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